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An Update On The SystemD System & Session Manager

08-23-2010, 09:50 AM

Phoronix: An Update On The SystemD System & Session Manager

There's an update on systemd by Lennart Poettering, the Berlin developer that created this project to serve as a new system and session manager for Linux. The systemd manager is compatible with existing SysV and LSB init scripts while it leverages D-Bus activation, heavily supports parallelization, and has many other features that makes it of interest to distribution vendors and end-users. Red Hat has already switched from SysVinit to systemd with Fedora 14 and judging from Lennart's blog post today it will likely gain more acceptance based upon the recent improvements...

Surprised? SystemD is something new, under development primarily by a Fedora person, and not yet in any formally released distro. It may turn out to be the future, but why on earth would Ubuntu be supporting it already?

Comment

Surprised? SystemD is something new, under development primarily by a Fedora person, and not yet in any formally released distro. It may turn out to be the future, but why on earth would Ubuntu be supporting it already?

Well, xorg-edgers does exist, doesn't it? Ubuntu often packages stuff that's still in development. Then again, upstart is by Canonical and they Ubuntu guys might not be all too happy at a replacement coming in. I'd expect this to be the basis for the rather harsh comment. Suspicion that Ubuntu packagers are holding a grudge.

Comment

Well, xorg-edgers does exist, doesn't it? Ubuntu often packages stuff that's still in development. Then again, upstart is by Canonical and they Ubuntu guys might not be all too happy at a replacement coming in. I'd expect this to be the basis for the rather harsh comment. Suspicion that Ubuntu packagers are holding a grudge.

That, and replacing your 'init' system isn't a trivial exercise. Replacing the X server with a bleeding-edge version is no big deal - it might not work, but it's easy to do, and easy to revert. The same can't be said for ripping out upstart or sysvinit and dropping in systemd instead.

Besides, this kind of dispute is silly. Lennart and co have written a new init daemon, which Fedora and SuSe are adopting. That's nice, but why should Ubuntu immediately ditch the system they built, and move to the shiny new one? Remember, systemd is *very* new, less than a year old, and there's really no good reason for Ubuntu to adopt it just now.